From Humanities, what Samuel Johnson really did: He made dictionaries matter; an article on Webster’s Third, the most controversial dictionary in the English language; and the Dictionary of Old English explores the brutality and elegance of our ancestral tongue. An excerpt from A Sensitive Liberal's Guide to Life: How to Banter with Your Barista, Hug Mindfully, and Relate to Friends Who Choose Kids Over Dogs by The Uptight Seattleite. An excerpt from Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson’s Reagan’s Secret War. A review of Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging by Greg Critser. The calorie-restriction experiment: Eating much, much less helped rats live longer — will it work on humans? Radical life extension and the problem of Malthusian hells: Is living longer in an overcrowded world better than the alternative? A review of Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes by Victoria Clark. Graeme Wood reviews The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today by Ted Conover (and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more). Adios, Amigos: How Latin America stopped caring what the United States thinks. Does suffering really offer spiritual dividends, or is the emphasis on it in Christianity (and many other traditions) something equivalent to a psychological flaw writ large? From Ctheory, Michael Betancourt on The State of Information. Now that men are starting to take over the kitchen, German publisher Gruner and Jahr dishes up a new magazine, called BEEF! Michael Scherer on how the White House scrambles to tame the news cyclone. From Vermont Commons, Bill Miller on why Lincoln was wrong on secession. Ron Holland on secession, a solution to the Washington debt threat.
